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Except there are many things for which we used human readable formats in the 1980s for which we use binary formats now - HTTP headers, for example. CSV was de
by graemep 1y ago
Except there are many things for which we used human readable formats in the 1980s for which we use binary formats now - HTTP headers, for example.
CSV was definitely in wide use back then.
Text formats are compressible.
- self_awareness 1y agoText formats are compressible because they waste a lot of space to encode data. Instead of the space of 256 values per byte they use maybe 100.
- graemep 1y agoI assumed that is common knowledge here. The point is that you need to take that into account when discussing storage requirements.
- self_awareness 1y agoSo I guess it's also a common knowledge that a compressed stream needs to be uncompressed in order to use it. So argumenting that compressed stream takes smaller space on a floppy disk doesn't mean that it will also take the same amount of bytes in memory. Also I'd argue if HTTP1 can be treated as a pure text format, since it requires \r and \n as EOL markers, even on systems that only use \n. Strict binary requirements like this shouldn't be needed if it was a text protocol.